Jean-Michel Jarre achieved global recognition with his 1976 album Oxygène, selling 12 million albums at a time when progressive music was supposedly in retreat. Forty-six years later, he brings us Oxymore, which suggests we’re in for more of the same – or at the very least, we’ll be treated to some motifs from across the decades. The title turns out to be a red herring. It’s a play on ‘oxymoron’ rather than a declaration of more Oxygène, an obvious semantic correlation that Jarre claims he didn’t notice initially.
If Oxymore has an antecedent then it’s 1984’s Zoolook, a record that used the Fairlight CMI to build sonic worlds, festooned with manipulated voices spouting 25 different languages. But the listener needs to go back further still to 1968 to identify the true inspiration for Oxymore, to the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), where Jarre studied under musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Schaeffer would come to renounce his sonic experiments towards the end of his life in 1995, but the other Pierre was still composing with found sounds well into the 21st century.
Henry’s voice is present on the introductory track, Agora, and it recurs intermittently throughout. On Agora (Greek for ‘gathering place’), the listener first detects what sounds like typing on a page, followed by dripping water that fulminates in a gush, then sporadic voices and whispering, chopped up and moving from speaker to speaker over some radio static. Then comes Henry, the daring Paris-born composer, talking about the process of making compositions using the fabric of sound, all in French of course.
Agora sets things up nicely for the title track, a dramatic and ominous example of where we’ll go, a kind of primordial dawn of recorded sound built from the fragments of objets trouvés, mixed in a state-of-the-art studio. The Oxymore oxymoron refers to the contrasts of collage, exploring the possibilities of cutting-up fragments with cutting-edge technology, 110 years after Picasso and Braque were slipping bits of newspaper into their painted canvases at the height of Cubism. Montage is no longer a radical artform these days, though the way Jarre melds electro-acoustic sounds with his ultra-modern studio creates a fascinating tension.
Jarre had hoped to work with Henry when he recorded more than 30 collaborations for his Electronica project – released in two volumes in 2015 and 2016. Sadly, his sonic guru was too ill to contribute, but before Henry died, he made a series of recordings that were bequeathed to Jarre via his wife, Isabelle Warnier. The stems full of concrète sounds, as well as the composer talking about processes and textures, form the basis of Jarre’s 22nd studio album.
Oxymore is perhaps most interesting thanks to Jarre’s willingness to return to the GRM with the same mindset he would have had in 1968. He eschews melody in favour of strange textures and disembodied, sometimes coquettish voices, like on Sex In The Machine and Synthy Sisters. Definable, ear-catching tunes are sacrificed to the gods of experimentation, but the unifying dance grooves he presents make for a cogent and cohesive experience.
When JMJ became famous in the mid-to-late 70s, it was partly thanks to his decision to take his avant-garde training and marry it to accessible, catchy melodies like on the hit single Oxygène (Part IV); moreover, his music tapped into a general optimism engendered by space travel, and a naïve assumption of progress. Here we get the brutality of Brutalism, or the Poe-like horror of Animal Genesis, and that positivity has evaporated, with more of a sense that we’re stuck in an awesome dystopian machine from which it’s impossible to escape. If it’s punishing at times, it also illustrates why Jarre is an artist who has, for the most part, remained in touch with what’s going on. His music oozes with the now, and it always has.
The titular oxymoron, then, where future meets past, also extends to the way we listen. Recorded sound has come on in leaps and bounds since Schaeffer founded the Studio d’Essai in 1941, and then later the GRM, although we’ve been living with stereophonic sound since the late 60s and there’s been little in the way of progress in the way we consume music since then. Jarre made a case for 5.1 surround sound around the release of his compilation, AERO, in 2004, and while 5.1 didn’t catch on other than in cinemas, he goes in to bat for binaural sound this time around. The enhanced binaural mix isn’t available as we go to press, though listening, it’s easy to imagine how it might work. Ever the innovator, Jean-Michel Jarre’s desire to shape the future leaves little room for nostalgia.
DEVIN TOWNSEND
Lightwork HEVYDEVY RECORDS/INSIDEOUT
Canadian maverick swaps heavy riffs for synths and strings.
Born from material that Devin Townsend wrote during the pandemic, Lightwork finds him in a reflective, optimistic mood. Unusually, the one-man prog powerhouse brought in a co-producer for the album in the form of GGGarth Richardson, whose credits include Rage Against The Machine, Melvins and Biffy Clyro. The result of their collaboration isn’t what might be expected given Richardson’s extensive background in heavy rock. Lightwork builds on the direction Townsend pointed towards on Empath, with less emphasis on mammoth guitar riffs and venturing into the territory of progressive pop.
Sonically, Townsend maintains his trademark wall of sound, like a proggy version of Phil Spector minus the evil undercurrent. It’s a huge, deep mix, with instruments layered upon each other measured in fathoms, big, punchy drums, and vast swathes of strings and synthesisers. The opening establishes the vibe, with Townsend touching on falsetto with his vocals, a cheerfully catchy chorus hook, and lyrics that introduce the album’s themes about self-discovery and coming out of the darkness, metaphorically addressing all the uncertainties of the pandemic.
